Scientists have spotted the brightest flare yet from a supermassive black hole that shines with the light of 10 trillion suns.
The flare came from a supermassive black hole 10 billion light years away – making it the most distant one observed so far.
The flash likely occurred because a large star wandered too close to the black hole and was shredded to pieces.
These bursts of light and energy can emanate from tangled-up magnetic fields or hiccups in the heated gas disks surrounding black holes.
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“At first, we didn’t really believe the numbers about the energy,” said study author Matthew Graham of the California Institute of Technology, which operates the Palomar Observatory, where the cosmic display was spotted in 2018.
The flare took around three months to shine at peak brightness and has been decaying in the years since.
The new findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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Almost every large galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its centre – but scientists still aren’t sure how they form.
Studying such behemoths can help researchers better understand the stellar neighbourhood surrounding supermassive black holes.
The findings also allow scientists “to probe the interaction of supermassive black holes with their environments early in the universe,” said Joseph Michail with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which was not involved in the study.
